This section introduces aspects that may help facilitate a better understanding of the invention. Accordingly, the statements of this section are to be read in this light and are not to be understood as admissions about what is prior art or what is not prior art.
An optical packet router is an important component of an optical communication network. An efficient optical packet router is based on a synchronous optical switch fabric, which enables substantial enhancement of bandwidth and reduction in network latency. Proper operation of a synchronous optical switch fabric is achieved when all incoming data packets are appropriately synchronized to a reference clock. However, if the synchronization is not sufficiently accurate and/or stable, the resulting skew and/or jitter in incoming data packets may cause transmission errors or other deleterious effects on the network traffic. For example, one deleterious effect of poor alignment is that it might force the use of a relatively large guard time between packets, bits, cells, and/or envelopes, which appreciably reduces the throughput of the switch or router.
The aforementioned '191 and '201 applications disclose channel synchronizers for synchronizing data packets from different channels heading to an optical router. Different channel synchronizers are described in such applications, some of which incorporate a multi-channel optical arrayed time buffer, having an array of delay lines (e.g., optical fibers) of different lengths coupled between two arrayed waveguide gratings (AWGs).